Pragmatic competence is as an essential aspect of communicative competence. Does environment have an effect on developing pragmatic competence? Do levels of pragmatic competence differ between English as a second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL) students? Most studies have shown greater pragmatic awareness among ESL students than EFL students, indicating that the target la...

Informed by a bridging activities model (Thorne & Reinhardt, 2008), the authors designed and implemented a series of activities using Facebook to develop elementary level Korean learners’ socio-pragmatic awareness of the use of Korean honorifics. Nine students took part in the activities, which involved student collaboration to create five invented profiles and shared resources, guided analysis...

Poor maternal nutritional status and substandard antenatal care, which result in increased women's risk, low birth weight and stillbirth, afflict many countries with weak or emerging economies even today. Studies that address the effect of extending nutrition awareness among pregnant women to the net outcome of pregnancy remain scarce. We aimed to compare and contrast the effect of a pragmatic ...

This study investigated the impact of individual differences like language proficiency, gender and age on the Iranian EFL learners interlanguage pragmatics in institutional discourse especially, their capacity to recognize and to rate pragmatic and grammatical infelicities in speech act situations of request and apology.  To this end, one hundred and eighty-seven EFL university students at thre...

onveying a strong message within a language stems from not only a linguistically appropriate utterance but also a pragmatically appropriate discourse. Broadly considering various facets of pragmatics, pragmatic assessment has not been potentially brought into perspective. To address this discourse gap, this study, guided by the principles of mixed-method design, pursued three purposes: ...

Despite the general findings that address the positive contribution of teaching pragmatic features to interlanguage pragmatic development, the question as to the most effective method is far from being resolved. Moreover, the potential of literature as a means of introducing learners into the social practices and norms of the target culture, which underlie the pragmatic competence, has not been...

We model unawareness of possibilities in decision-making and (linguistic) pragmatic reasoning. A background model is filtered through a state of limited awareness to provide the epistemic state of an agent who is not attending to all possibilities. We extend the standard notion of awareness with assumptions (implicit beliefs about propositions the agent is unaware of) and define a dynamic updat...